<iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-PKGWQMKL" height="0" width="0"></iframe> Our Course On AI Evals I’m teaching a course on AI Evals with Shreya Shankar. Here are some of the most common questions we’ve been asked. We’ll be updating this list frequently. Warning: These are sharp opinions about what works in most cases. They are not universal truths. Use your judgment. Q: Is RAG dead? Question: Should I avoid using RAG for...

We don’t live in the northern Sydney suburb of Chatswood anymore, but we still take the train down often for all the Asian food and atmosphere. Also our dentist! I accompanied Clara down today while she had a regular checkup, and decided to grab a coffee and a light lunch from the Northgreen Café while I waited. Alas, in the time we moved away, it looks as though they’ve wrapped up. The lights were out and furniture were gone, though the pretty vines they’d wrapped around the awnings we...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 323  | Jun 18, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

As the entire Fulbright board resigned last week and as the program that promotes international visits for US researchers, and vice-versa, may not survive the Trump administration, I thought I would recount some memories from my Fulbright scholarship to the Netherlands in 1996-97. The program had considerable paperwork for a relatively small stipend, but it went beyond the compensation. I went to a meeting in Amsterdam with the other fellows, mostly grad students and postdocs. I was the old ...

I want to talk about the high level concept of what a search engine does. And I don’t mean like, Google, or Kagi, “the product,” but the technical object which is a search engine. A search engine is really does two almost entirely conceptually separate tasks that are simply colocated frequently enough that it’s coherent to bundle them together as the single concept of “search engine.” These two tasks are retrieval and ranking. Retrieval is finding all the documents which satisfy ...

This is a quick update- I've included below the design file updates for the Recovery Kit 2B which uses the smaller battery. The Raspberry Pi 5 is still too hungry for this smaller battery, so this build is better for a Pi3 or Pi4. The original Recovery Kit 2 battery is now discontinued, but with a tweak to the ends on the battery enclosure ends, you can use the newer Shargeek 140 . Check out the original link here for rest of the build info , but the full set of files is below, including the...

Prescientific and preindustrial thought tied truth to authority and tradition. “We’ve always done it this way.” “The king decrees it.” “We know this is how it’s done.” The scientific and industrial revolutions shattered this mindset. Suddenly, outsiders could challenge entrenched norms. Two brothers in a rundown workshop could build empires to rival the wealthiest lords. Ordinary people could question the highest authorities. What made this possible? A belief in objective tru...

This was a lightning talk I did at BSDCan . It was a great conference and I'll be sure to be there next year! import execFor from '/js/hls.js'; execFor('16f94e39d35a09f4ce1446f0e8e4649b4730eb404117b2263739db2f690d2b24', 'https://files.xeiaso.net/talks/2025/bsdcan-anubis/index.m3u8'); Want to watch this in your video player of choice? Take this: https://files.xeiaso.net/talks/2025/bsdcan-anubis/index.m3u8 The title slide with the talk and speaker nam...

If you have never stood in front of your destination, with your back to it, and said to the kids "I think it's around here somewhere. Possibly over there... while pointing in the opposite direction to said destination, are you even a Dad at all? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is great, and you're great for using it. ❤️ Reply to this post by email ● Sign my guestbook If you have never stood in front of your destination, with your ba...

The other day while chatting with Kevin I was commenting on the fact that our experimental Junes are going in opposite directions. In his most recent Sunday update, he wrote that But I think the experiment won’t have as big an impact as I expected. While I wrote I’m overjoyed with how this experiment is going and I’m currently thinking about which lasting changes I should make to keep some of these positive effects around for the long run. I thought that was quite interesti...

After many months of previews, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash have reached general availability with new, memorable model IDs: gemini-2.5-pro and gemini-2.5-flash . They are joined by a new preview model with an unmemorable name: gemini-2.5-flash-lite-preview-06-17 is a new Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite model that offers lower prices and much faster inference times. I've added support for the new models in llm-gemini 0.23 : llm install -U llm-gemini llm 'Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicyc...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/goodproject.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/goodproject.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/goodproject.html

On June 12, 2025, most of GCP went offline. This led to downstream outages in a multitude of websites and services, such as Cloudflare , Spotify , OpenAI, Anthropic, Replit, and many others. With a few days of hindsight, GCP published a quite detailed postmortem . Frankly, I’m impressed by the depth of this PM and the quantity of technical details that they released publicly. Given this level of detail, it’s feasible to piece together a reasonably full picture of what happened and what ...

👋 This week’s a little different — not one deep-dive desk tour, but a whole bunch of bite-sized ones. We’ve rounded up 15 smart ways to set up a home office in a small space. From spare nooks to spots under the stairs, there’s plenty here to spark ideas. Enjoy! Working from home can be a dream — unless you’ve got no room to work with. If you live in a small flat or share your space with others, carving out a calm, productive corner for your job might feel impossible. On the b...

Alec and Maxime in front of The School of Athens as a tapestry, immitating the central figures Read more on the site… Alec and Maxime in front of The School of Athens as a tapestry, immitating the central figures Read more on the site… Alec and Maxime in front of The School of Athens as a tapestry, immitating the central figures Alec and Maxime in front of The School of Athens as a tapestry, immitating the central figures Read more on the site… Read more on the site...

Coding agents have crossed a chasm Somewhere in the last few months, something fundamental shifted for me with autonomous AI coding agents. They’ve gone from a “hey this is pretty neat” curiosity to something I genuinely can’t imagine working without. Coding agents have crossed a chasm Somewhere in the last few months, something fundamental shifted for me with autonomous AI coding agents. They’ve gone from a “hey this is pretty neat” curiosity to something I genuinely can’t imag...

For Martin Schrimpf, the promise of artificial intelligence is not in the tasks it can accomplish. It’s in what AI might reveal about human intelligence. He is working to build a “digital twin” of the brain using artificial neural networks — AI models loosely inspired by how neurons communicate with one another. That end goal sounds almost ludicrously grand, but his approach is straightforward. Source For Martin Schrimpf, the promise of artificial intelligence is not in the tasks it c...

Go team wrote golang.org/x/sys/windows package to call functions in a Windows DLL. Their way is inefficient and this article describes a better way. The sys/windows way To call a function in a DLL, let’s say kernel32.dll , we must: load the dll into memory with LoadLibrary get the address of a function in the dll call the function at that address Here’s how it looks when you use sys/windows library: var ( libole32 * windows . LazyDLL c...

A collaborative effort, from me and the emails in my junk folder. “You are being contacted to help improve the services you receive.” Dear beneficiary Let’s talk. You Are Designed For Possibility & Greatness. (Action Needed) Take advantage of this New opportunity. I think you'll find the subject really interesting:  Make Waves. Here's a short description: Challenges and learnings How to avoid playing it safe, without playing it stupid all of life is choices ...

This week I spent time with friends to letting agents go wild and see what we could build in 24 hours . I took some notes for myself to reflect on that experience. I won't bore you with another vibecoding post, but you can read Peter's post about how that went. As fun as it was, it also was frustrating in other ways and in entire predictable ways. It became a meme about how much I hated working with Xcode for this project. This got me thinking quite a bit more that this has been an enti...

Publish that novella, build an OS, converse in Mandarin, release an indie game, publish that other novella, dominate a continent -- It's not enough to breathe -- my gluttonous heart wants to impose its imagination on Earth and all its inhabitants. I want freedom, money, affection, play, power, validation, fulfillment, etc. Of course I already have these things, but enough never seems enough. These desires manifest themselves as an endless backlog of ideas and projects. My backlog grows...

Before we begin this week’s Moon Monday, consider taking a moment of silence for everyone affected by the deadly Air India flight crash in Ahmedabad on June 12. 😔 Ling Xin reports that on May 22, China moved the Tiandu 1  lunar orbiter from its Distant Retrograde Orbit (DRO) to a 3:1 resonance orbit. This move comes after the small 61-kilogram (at launch) spacecraft helped China achieve the first ever daytime Earth-Moon laser distance measurements using an orbiter earlier this yea...

If you’re using Cursor like everyone else, you’re essentially lighting money on fire. I discovered this the hard way after burning through my monthly credits in just 8 days (again.) The problem isn’t Cursor’s pricing; it’s how we’re using it. Most developers don’t realize is that each “request” in Cursor can handle up to 25 tool calls before it’s considered complete. That single “hey, add types to this function” burns an entire request slot, even though you could ha...